Sixteen Candles of Eternity
by detective-sweetheart
Summary: She asks what happened, and he can think of nothing to tell her other than that he got sidetracked watching eternity along the way home.


**A/N: Ooh, look. SVU fic! Yeah, ignore that, it's just me being lame. Anyway, SVU's not mine, and I suppose you could count this as a post-ep for Screwed if you want. Oh, and there's a reference to the season five episode 'Choice' if you look hard enough. **

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It burned. He didn't know why it fascinated him, but it did. He hadn't been inside a church in the middle of the night for a long while. But he came now. To think, to sit, to just be there…to light a candle for those who had been affected by the goings-on in the world. For his partner, and their colleagues. Their captain, and his family, and every child in the city. But only one for the children, collectively. There were so many of them.

The only one he would not light a candle for was himself. It seemed selfish, self-centered. So the candles were for everyone else, and he watched then burn. The tiny, flickering lights seemed to illuminate the dark side of his soul, and it was a relief, because there was nothing he wanted more. Nothing he needed more. But he needed and wanted and what he got were two different things.

Life, Elliot mused, was definitely a lot more complicated than anyone ever made it out to be. Outside, it rained, but outside, it was also Queens, and not Manhattan. That, too, was a relief. Home waited, a few blocks away. When he decided to leave this place, it would be there that he went. Home, for the first time in a little over eternity. Two years, really. But eternity was what it had felt like.

The candles continued to burn. He could see the melted wax and was startled to see that it was almost clear. The candles were white, which was probably why. Last time, they had been red…as red as the blood that had been there on his clothes.

He remained where he was. The place was quiet in a comforting sort of way, much unlike the deafening silence that had seemed to follow him around before. Things were finally back on track, for the most part, and that was all he really needed. One of the candles flickered suddenly, and Elliot watched to see what it would do. It remained lit, resisting whatever unseen force was pushing against it.

To think that something so little as a candle could do that…It was amazing, in that pure and simple way that a lot of things were. Life was too short to take much for granted, as he'd been doing, he thought, and suddenly something else came to him. It was an old lesson of all things. One of those object lessons that made no sense until it had been done a million times over.

It involved a string, and a pair of scissors. The candle flickered again as Elliot thought about it, and one of the others had gone out. The string was what represented eternity. The scissors had been used to cut away the small, insignificant part of it that represented life. And when the two had been held side by side…life was definitely nothing compared to what would come.

Another candle had gone out, but it still wasn't the one that had been flickering. That one seemed determined to stick around, more so than he had been a while back. He had lost track of how long he had been there, but it wasn't like he had a curfew anymore. He could, and would, stay as long as he wanted. And he wanted to stay until most of the candles went out. Now it was as if they were the thing that represented eternity.

He didn't particularly want to think about how everything had changed, but found that he couldn't help it. It felt like he had been through hell and back, though he knew he really hadn't been. It felt like he had been through more than one lifetime, but that hadn't happened, either. He'd only been given one life to life. The fact that it felt like more was his fault and his alone.

A third candle had gone out. He'd lit sixteen, an even number. The squad, not counting himself, squared. Twice the number of years he'd been partnered with Olivia. The precinct number, and the number of years he'd been in SVU. There were thirteen more to go. Thirteen more chances, figuratively speaking. But he only really needed one. And now he had that one. Unconsciously, his hand drifted towards his pocket, and there were his keys, for everything from the lockbox to the house. A faint smile crossed his face for a brief moment and then went away. The fourth candle had gone out.

Elliot mulled over this for a moment and found himself thinking about the case they'd just closed. About the victims, and then acquittal that had been handed down, because the defense had been so effective at making it look like the hadn't done their jobs. About the squad and how they'd all been affected by this. About how he had been affected, himself, and how he'd come this close to losing everything, because of that dark side of himself that never went away. And it scared him, because he knew that it could always happen again .And all he could really do was hope that it wouldn't.

If he had known that waiting would hurt, he wouldn't have done it. And yet, he had no idea why it hurt, and in all honesty, it didn't make sense. Maybe it was because he knew that there were plenty of mistakes, on his part. Because he'd seen too much and had been so unwilling to admit it before now, before things had gone so wrong, and it was only just now starting to feel like he could breathe again. Like some kind of weight had been lifted, even though in truth, the weight was still there…just not as obvious. There were a lot of things that weren't so obvious anymore, and as he looked up, the next candle had gone out.

Twelve left. He wondered how much longer he'd have to wait, alone, before someone realized that he wasn't where he was supposed to be and came to find him. It wasn't the matter of being alone there that really bothered him, it was just the quiet. Granted, it was supposed to be quiet in a church, one couldn't very well go through the place shouting at the top of their voice, but it was late, and the quiet had always bothered him when it was late and he couldn't sleep. He was here, now, not because he couldn't sleep, but because he wanted to think, and had felt, for some reason, like home wasn't the place to do it. And so he had kept driving, past there, without knowing where he was really going, and had ended up here.

It would have been funny if he hadn't been thinking about what he'd been thinking about. Eternity and all the definitions. The time spent on the street trying to save someone else's child from having to go through the rest of their lives with that empty look in their eyes. Time he spent staring at his reflection, never able to look for long, because up until this point, it had gotten to where he couldn't stand what he saw. As if he weren't seeing himself, when he knew that was exactly what he was seeing. But what he had become and what he'd once been were different things; people changed, he knew this, everyone knew this, and no one could ever stay the same forever. If it could be that way, Elliot mused, children would always be innocent, and no one would grow up to do the things that he and the other three were sent to put them away for. There would be no reason to. And that vicious, never-ending cycle of violence, well…it wouldn't have been there. But it was, and that was the problem.

Eleven candles left. He'd been watching that one in the middle, the one that had been flickering out earlier. It had managed to remain lit so far, and he couldn't help but hope, then, that it would be the last one to go out, before the silence got to him to the point where he left, because he didn't want it pressing in on him anymore. There was a good chance that it would be the last one, but he still wanted to see. And he wasn't altogether sure why, either. Maybe because it reminded him of himself. Or maybe even because that was the one that would represent the last chance, the one he was being given now.

One more chance. He'd heard the phrase so many times from other people, who wanted to change the way they were, wanted to start over, but then, by the time SVU got to them, it was, most of the time, already too late. He found it incredibly hypocritical that he could expect another chance and be given one when these other people could not. Of course, certain circumstances had given him this other chance; he remembered telling Olivia once that if it ever happened again, he'd shoot himself, but now as he thought of it, it had just been one of those comments that he knew she'd laughed at him behind his back for, because they both knew it was never going to happen, and besides that, he'd told her what was going on, and in any case, he was still alive.

Ten candles. A hand on his shoulder made him jump and he turned, to find Olivia standing there, looking half-amused.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, quietly, and she shrugged and came to sit down beside him.

"Kathy called me," she replied. "She was worried when you didn't come home like you said you would. I think she thinks you might've driven off the bridge. What happened?"

Leave it to her to make some comment about what he was doing here. Elliot leaned forward, elbows on his knees and sighed, motioning to the candles as he replied.

"I got sidetracked watching eternity."


End file.
